All This Twisted Glory (This Woven Kingdom, #3)

by Tahereh Mafi

There are only two choices, little one. Cyrus moved to speak, a fragile hope gathering in his chest, but his old teacher lifted a hand to stop him. It was with unmistakable sorrow that the man looked him in the eye and said— Few can die. Or many.

God, he’d wanted her. He’d wanted her with an all-consuming thirst, with the desperation of a man waiting to die.

That day, Cyrus had learned cowardice was a luxury. Only the privileged few could afford to run away, to lock their doors and close their eyes to ugliness. The rest lived in homes without doors to lock, looked through eyes without lids to shut. They confronted the dark even as their hearts trembled, as their souls shook—for even strangled by fear, there was no choice but to endure.

Fate, he thought bitterly, was only romantic when one was destined to be the hero.

He only closed his eyes against her hair and fought the desperate crush of his chest, the violence of his affection for her. How she managed to disarm him even now, on the brink of death, he could not understand. She’d wept for his pain, wiped the blood from his eyes, taken an arrow in the back for him. She’d shown him more loyalty and tenderness in two days than he’d ever felt in his life, and he knew then, with a force that drove the air from his lungs, that he would never survive her.

“You must not resist life when it becomes inconvenient to live. You cannot outrun fear. You should not ignore pain. You will not outlive death.”

But life cannot be experienced one emotion at a time. It is a tapestry of sensation, a braided rope of feeling. We must allow for reflection even when we suffer. We must reach for compassion even when we triumph. If you spend your days waiting for your sorrows to end so that you might finally live”—he shook his head—“you will die an impatient man.”

“Master yourself so that you will never be mastered. Know yourself so that you might live with conviction. Live with conviction so that your steps never falter.” He paused. “The mastery of self means never fearing the consequences of doing what is right.”

“When you suffer,” Rostam went on, “you can choose to endure, or you can choose to overcome.” He gestured around them, to the vast expanse of the meadow. “Here, even in the midst of your discomfort, there existed elements of relief, if only you had bothered to search.”

“You can’t lie to me forever, Cyrus. I’m going to find out the truth about you, and when I do, I promise you this: I’ll ruin him. I’ll make the devil regret the day he was born.”